With 2nd International BigDataExpo, co-located with 11th Cloud Expo, due to kick off in two weeks'' time for 4 days of high-energy networking and discussions, what better time to remind you in greater detail of the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...?We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from November 5 - 8 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: Tom Leyden is Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, a Belgian Object Storage Innovator. He joined Amplidata in 2009 to drive the company’s marketing, product management and PR strategies.

Leyden has 15 years’ experience working for disruptive IT companies (from emerging stage to acquisition) including four years in cloud computing. Through his collaboration with Belgium-based technology incubator Incubaid, he has been involved in several successful startups, including data deduplication pioneer DataCenter Technologies and cloud Innovator Q-layer.

The new paradigm that will help us store massive amounts of unstructured data is Object Storage. Object Storage systems are uniformly scalable pools of storage that are accessible through a REST interface. Files – objects – are dumped into the pool and an identifier is kept to locate the object when it is needed. Applications that are designed to run on top of object storage will use these identifiers through the REST protocol. A good analogy is parking your car Valet vs. self park. When you self park you have to remember the lot, the floor, the aisle etc (file system); with Valet you get a receipt when you give your keys and you will later use that receipt to get your car back. Big Data for analytics is a paradigm that became popular in the previous decade. "

About Jeremy GeelanJeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.